The Circus

Parades are wonderful events, and there is no better parade than a circus parade. I was very young when I saw Harry Truman riding in an open car through the streets of Minneapolis on his way to election. I saw Santa Claus himself waving to the crowds on his way to Macy’s in New York City, accompanied by a giant helium balloon Mickey Mouse, among other notables. I’ve seen the breath-taking pageantry of the Bread and Puppet Theater parading with demonstrators marching through the streets of Washington, DC. And I’ve been part of those parades myself, playing my tuba in Fourth of July parades, the American flag whipping bravely in the lead, high-stepping with the Indiana University “Marching 100”, waving from festival floats, chanting, singing, in political protest marches, lifting placards and banners high, and recreating the enthusiasm of Palm Sunday with palm-waving parades around churches I have served. All parades are wonderful. But none can compare with a circus parade.

My first experience of a circus parade was in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, the county seat of Westmorland County, where I was born and where my grandparents lived. Can you imagine elephants coming through the streets of your home town? Let me tell you, it was far more magnificent than Harry Truman. And imagine wagons pulled by teams of camels. The horses carried breathtakingly beautiful young women in tight, brightly sequined costumes, woolly-chapped cowboys and wild Indians in feathered head-dresses. Some of the horses pulled wagons with cages filled with savage tigers and lions. And of course there were the clowns. The people of the circus were no ordinary human beings. They filled our streets with wonder and surprise—bouquets of flowers springing from the fingers of the clowns prefigured the amazing feats we would see later under canvas, the young women standing on the backs of horses galloping in circles around the ring, brave young men whipping wild beasts into obedience and risking their lives on high trapeze and tight rope. The circus parade is no ordinary parade.

A circus parade is an act of the imagination that has taken on real life. Dr Seuss has a story about a young boy who comes home one day to tell his father about a grand circus parade he has just witnessed. “And to think that it happened on Mulberry Street!” he says in his excitement.

His sceptical father quizzes him. Did he really see such a magnificent parade? Each time the boy repeats the story of what he has seen, the vision becomes a little less grand. But he never loses his enthusiasm: “And to think that I saw it on Mulberry Street!” he continues to exclaim.

Finally, the father wears the son down to the truth. What the boy saw was, in fact, the horse-drawn cart of the man delivering milk. The gap between our ordinary experience and the magnificence of the circus can be vast, and there is something about the process of maturation that inhibits the imagination's passion for spanning it. How boring life is without imagination, forced to live within the narrow tyranny of mere truth.